And if it were just his shooting I might agree, but I'm just saying that his overall game was not very good for the first 1/8th of the season. That's not a big enough sample to say that he couldn't have normalized to MVP levels, and it says nothing about rust/mental issues that might have faded over the course of the season if he didn't get hurt, but I do think it says something.

Just my 2c though. I didn't see every game, and maybe the turnovers/assists were bad luck as much as the poor shooting.

Mad Men might provoke introspection on the part of the viewer, and it might have an occasionally introspective (or at least brooding) protagonist, but its conflicts are usually pretty straightforward sex, power, and violence. Those are all external.

I think he's about done writing, and it may be for the best. Kornheiser was fantastic writing and then lost his fastball and became an amazing radio and tv (ex-MNF) personality. I think at this point Bill is better at podcasts/tv than he is at writing, and since writing is 1000x harder and Bill is already rich...just hard to see that remaining a focus.

It's why the weekly NFL picks need to go away. Other people do weekly NFL columns much better at this point. It's not Bill's strong suit, and instead of mailing it in or otherwise forcing it he should spend more time on the NBA and audio/video content. That's just where he is in life now, in my humble opinion.

He started as the "Digital City Boston Sports Guy" writing about Boston sports from a fan perspective on AOL. They also had a local Movie Guy and TV Gal and so on. ESPN is in Bristol, CT and so it has a lot of Boston fans working there, and ESPN execs in that area would see his content when they logged into AOL. He ended up getting hired to "Page 2" on ESPN.com as a sort of hybrid columnist/fan blogger, and so being a Boston fan has always been part of his schtick.

One problem is that now he's a TV host, where there's an expectation of journalistic standards that doesn't exist on the internet, but they manage it the same way every host does--just downplaying their bias when acting in a journalistic role. It might be better to acknowledge it, but whatever.

It's interesting though--his schtick is still that he's a hardcore Boston fan, but I sometimes get the impression he actually cares more about the Clippers now and just doesn't want to alienate his fan base by fully acknowledging it. Whatever, I'm just impressed that a media pro still cares about the sport.

That's not really relevant here. The submersion of Holland Island wasn't caused by a change in the eustatic sea level due to climate change, melting polar ice caps, etc. That's not to say that those things haven't affected the eustatic sea level, or that they won't--it's just not what causes drastic local effects like this. It's probably a result of something like sediment compression, local tectonic changes, or changing local water flow patterns. There are a number of things that have local effects on sea level:

I see your point, and that is a valid way to look at it. I just think you have to be as clear as possible with people, because most of them don't understand it or ever look at it from the company's point of view. Anything that that might mislead someone into not taking advantage of the tax benefit--which exists regardless--and an easy behavioral way to save (direct deduction from the paycheck) should probably be explained very carefully.

The issue of whether a DB pension plan is better is an important theoretical/conceptual issue, but it's not really practical because most companies have learned their lessons. And on balance a good DC plan is probably better for all, incidentally.

This is absolutely false. Your personal contribution to a 401(k) never has a vestment period, in any 401(k) plan. The company's additional contribution may or may not, depending on the plan--though there may not even be an additional company contribution, depending on the plan.

Concerns about vestment shouldn't deter anyone from investing in a 401(k). You get the tax advantages no matter what, and you will never forfeit your personal contribution because you leave the company.

First let me caveat that if you want to be in the real weeds of daily insider news flow, you kind of need to be on the broker distribution lists. But that's a fire hose of information, and while there are blogs where it leaks or is repackaged, they all of the same problem as ZeroHedge--their business model is per click, and they're overrun by contributors pumping their own agendas. That said, there are great financial blogs out there, most of which give a broader overview that is better suited for someone who just wants to be well-informed anyway:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/ NPR's Planet Money blog and podcasts would be the #1 financial news source I'd recommend to a non-financial professional with a brain. You don't have to be interested in the economy to find these interesting, and you can know almost everything about the economy and still learn from them. Not a ton of content, but the podcasts are excellent.

http://www.economist.com/blogs Blogs from The Economist, which is the one periodical/app you need to own if you want to be well-informed about the world. The magazine is better than the blogs, but you can get it all via the web site or app.

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/ The Financial Times is behind a pay wall too, but this blog isn't and it's the closest to be in-the-flow of market chatter. Heavily biased towards Europe though, obviously.

http://www.businessinsider.com/ The Gawker (or maybe CNBC?) of finance blogs. Very much driven by the per-click model, but it aggregates daily stuff and can give you a minute-by-minute fix of content if that's what you want. Stay away from the comment section.

EDITED TO ADD: This guy is r/politics level liberal, but he has a great iTunes U course that reddit would probably appreciate, and that probably extends to his blog as well. J. Bradford Delong, a very excitable and very liberal Econ professor at Cal: http://delong.typepad.com/

That's fair, you did say $200. But the prior calls ($100 oil, most notably) were mid-2000s. And March 2008 was prior to wheels completely falling off, but I do agree it was an atrocious call.

And you could draw the conclusion from their getting promoted that they were rewarded for helping the GS shorts, but as a firm GS was long energy longer than they should have been. Different desks made different bets, and the ones that listened to the macro news ignored the oil analysts, but you can see in some of their bad private equity investments (which are public) that they didn't have any special insight.

Look at it this way: if you know which way oil is going, you don't have to lie about it to make money. You can just make money. The truth is that no one knows which way oil was going, and moving from the buy-side to GS didn't give Arjun super powers. He's just as much a promotional sell-sider trying to drive activity and create a brand for himself as anyone.

To be honest, that's part of the old culture. For a couple reasons, the most important of which is now that no politician will touch an ex-GS employee. But also because the new trading types care more about money than power/prestige. That itself is in part because they don't make nearly as much money as the pre-IPO patricians did.

No, the point is the subtle change. Most clients are aware of it by now, but certainly not all, and certainly not the public.

It began in 1999 with the IPO. Then the 2006 promotion of Lloyd Blankfein--a man who had been turned down when he applied for a job with the old guard and then joined the firm as a trader via the back door of an acquisition--really began to catalyze things. The 2008 and 2010 partner cycles (they happen every 2 years) saw a massive exodus of expensive old guard types in favor of very aggressive, young, individualistic trading-oriented types. The culture has changed, and it has long-term consequences for clients and the firm. That's the interesting point here, and it's 100% true.

12 years ago GS was a private partnership, and not a listed stock, for instance. Oh, and banking and research were linked. And you could actually make money just buying and trading stocks, since computers hadn't eliminated margins. And there was no real GSAM. A lot has changed.

Titles mean different things at different banks, and at face value it's hard to tell what means what. At GS, the titles that matter are pretty simple:

Analyst: Title given right out of undergrad. Not to be confused with a sector analyst in the Research or Asset Management department.
Associate: Title given right out of grad school or after promotion from Analyst.

Vice President: Most common title at the firm, 5-15 years experience depending on one's career path. A lot of careers stall out here. Smith was a VP and his career probably was stalling out, though he did still have 12 years experience and I don't think it diminishes his views at all.

Managing Director: Where it gets interesting. The last step before...

(Partner) Managing Director: "Partners" aren't partners in the pre-IPO sense, but they are the ones who run the firm and get paid from the massive and separate partner compensation pool. This is the ultimate carrot for 99% of GS employees. It doesn't say PMD on your business card, but everyone in the firm knows who are the MDs and who are the PMDs. They're the "made" men, in mafia terms.

At Morgan Stanley, for instance, "Executive Director" is the equivalent of a GS "Managing Director", and "Director" is the equivalent of "VP". It gets confusing because "director" is also a term for a board member, which is not how it's being used here. I imagine that in London "Executive Director" has a specific meaning, perhaps related to a sub-corporation dealing with derivatives in this case. Likewise, you're right that he is the only US derivatives trader in London, and chose to style that as "Head of...". From a GS perspective, he's a VP, which is something, but not something truly senior.

But that's the point--he got passed over in favor of people who call clients "muppets".

EDIT: Apparently "Executive Director" is an equivalent title to "Vice President" used outside the US. He was reportedly a 6th year VP after 12 years at the firm, which means that he'd started out well (and probably misses the early days of his time there in part because he had never failed at anything and got promoted to Associate and VP right on schedule), but like many, many GS'ers a combination of politics, luck, and performance meant he was running out of time to ever make MD. He was almost certainly told as much in very blunt terms during his last couple annual reviews, so he had time to sour. But again--that's not the point.

Retail isn't exactly a big segment for Goldman, and to the extent it is it's the "Private Wealth Management" end of the spectrum. They'll continue to make their real money from sophisticated clients and companies who know exactly what game they're playing but want their connections or risk capacity--as well as a lot more (per client) from unsophisticated clients and companies who assume that Goldman Sachs is some kind of gold standard for how business is done. But someone will always be there to take advantage of dumb institutions with more money than sense.

ZeroHedge is 95% noise and paranoia. It's an entertainment site that makes money of page views, and it occasionally hosts content from unscrupulous types talking their own book. There's some wheat among the chaff, but take a giant grain of salt with anything that comes from there.